Green Schoolyards
Los Angeles County is home to 1.3 million students, attending 1,914 schools across 80 school districts. Collectively, school districts represent one of the largest landowners in LA County and offer minimal green space or shade canopy. These asphalt-covered schoolyards pose extreme health risks that exacerbate climate and environmental justice inequities in LA’s most vulnerable climate communities. With school-aged children being some of the most negatively affected by extreme heat events and existing environmental burdens, school greening represents a critical solution to redesign our school communities to help alleviate these environmental and public health impacts.
Council for Watershed Health (CWH) contributes over 27 years of experience partnering with school districts and public agencies to develop and implement school greening projects in LA County and across the State of California. The timeline below provides a brief background of our project experience. Click through to learn more and see how school greening has played in our work across all of our focus areas.
Since 2011...

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ReDesignLA "Grow with the Flows" Cohort
In ReDesignLA’s “Grow With the Flows” Cohort, mentors Day One and Promesa Boyle Heights guided mentees River in Action (RIA) and Nature for All as they identified the communities' needs and climate project priorities. During phase two, all four CBOs partners pursued school greening project opportunities in their communities of focus and successfully submitted competitive project proposals to Cal Fire’s Green Schoolyards grant program. In partnership with CWH, Nature for All and River in Action were awarded Cal Fire funding to support the planning and design stages for four of their school greening projects. This includes RIA’s projects at Miramonte Elementary School and Edison Middle School and Nature for All’s school greening projects at Rosa Parks Learning Center and Primary Academy for Success. Promesa Boyle Heights and Day One submitted separate Cal Fire proposals that have also been awarded funding. Given this cohort’s specific interest in school greening, CWH partnered with Claire Latané and Cal Poly Pomona’s Collaborative for Healthy and Inclusive Learning Environments (CHILE)’s Design Studio to support Promesa Boyle Heights, Nature for All, and RIA with developing initial design sketches for each of their school greening projects. Through this partnership, all three CBO partners built their technical knowledge around the design and planning stages of a school greening project process. Moving forward, CWH is committed to supporting each CBO with its community-led school greening projects.

Designing Health Schoolyards for LAUSD
The Council for Watershed Health in cooperation with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), applied for and was awarded a $1.6 million dollar planning grant as part of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s (Cal Fire) Green Schoolyards Program. Eight LAUSD schools were selected by Cal Fire to receive Green Schoolyard planning services: 118th, Holmes Avenue, Harmony, and Miramonte Elementary Schools, Edison Middle School, Primary Academy for Success, Diego Rivera Learning Complex, and Rosa Parks Learning Center.
Image Credit: Herrera Environmental Consultants

Map Credit: Lower LA River Revitalization Plan
Lower LA River School Greening Technical Assistance
The proposed Lower LA River School Greening Technical Assistance (Project), managed by Council for Watershed Health (CWH), aims to develop community-led and nature-based school greening projects.
The Project will create a network of school greening leaders and technical/Community-Based Organization (CBO) service providers (Bench) across the Lower LA River. Deliverables include 100% design for three schools, as well as technical assistance to support acquisition of implementation funds.
Our Current Work
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